Troubleshooting on Chengyu Wang

Tracking Down a Podsync 'Empty Duration' Crash: From a Bad Format String to Filling In the PO Token Gap

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:08:34 +0000

One feed kept crashing Podsync with a cryptic ‘bad format string’ error — three wrong turns later, the real fix meant switching Docker images and realizing YouTube’s PO Token wasn’t actually being generated at all.

From a Compromised VPS to Building a Real Website Backup System

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 10:00:10 +0000

After cleaning up malware off a VPS, the bigger realization was that defense alone isn’t enough without recoverability — so I built a four-layer backup system covering local snapshots, scheduled automation, off-site NAS sync, and recovery documentation.

Reflections After a VPS Security Incident: From Discovery to Building a Full Monitoring System

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:37:21 +0000

A cryptomining-style trojan ran undetected on my Oracle Cloud VPS for nearly 20 days — the real lesson wasn’t fixing that one box, but realizing monitoring itself needs to be monitored.

Podsync Download Troubleshooting Diary

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:00:07 +0000

Podsync started throwing YouTube bot-verification and rate-limit errors — the fix was exporting browser cookies into the container’s mounted data directory and wiring them into yt-dlp’s args.

Tracking Down Why My Ubuntu Server Kept Auto-Restarting After Shutdown, Post Wake-on-LAN Setup

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:00:08 +0000

A GPU server configured for Wake-on-LAN would shut down cleanly, then reboot itself ~10 seconds later — the culprit was ACPI wakeup left enabled on the network card, letting ordinary LAN broadcast traffic trigger a wake, not just the magic packet.

Chasing Down OpenClaw's Slow-Reply Problem: Auth Profiles and Session Stickiness

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 22:00:47 +0000

Adding more API keys didn’t fix the slowdowns — the real issue was a key that existed in secrets but was never registered for failover, plus session pinning that kept using the same key after a restart.

Weekend Chaos: Auto-Login Broke My Hackintosh, and AI Talked Me Back In

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:00:12 +0000

One innocent auto-login setting later, my Mac mini hackintosh was stuck in a boot loop — a night of Gemini-guided EFI edits, a networkless recovery dead end, and a reinstall that saved my data.

Tech Log: Chasing Down a Hijacked LAN Route on macOS

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:00:06 +0000

A NAS on 192.168.5.x went unreachable with ‘No route to host’ — the culprit was a leftover feth interface from an ad-blocker’s content-filter extension that never fully uninstalled.

Debugging a Broken Homepage: When a .mov File Got Treated as a Cover Image

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 16:00:09 +0000

A cover-image extractor that grabbed the first tag without checking it was actually an image — and broke the homepage whenever a post embedded video.

My Free Image Host Died Overnight — and How I Rebuilt It

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 23:16:00 +0000

Telegram quietly killed Telegraph’s image-hosting support, breaking the free image pipeline my blog depended on — here’s how I patched it back together in a day.

Podsync Stopped Fetching New Episodes — Turns Out It Was Google

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 10:00:13 +0000

A morning-commute podcast habit broken by an upstream block, not anything on my end.

Fixing a Blank White Box Where Code Blocks Should Be in Typecho

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 23:00:20 +0000

A CSS/plugin conflict was rendering code blocks as an ugly blank space — turned out to be a syntax-highlighting plugin fighting the theme.

Fixing an Ollama Install Failure Caused by a Snap-Installed curl

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:31 +0000

Installing curl via snap put it ahead of /usr/bin on PATH, which broke the Ollama installer in a confusing way.

Fixing a CUDA Error When Running Gemma2 in Ollama

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 22:36:33 +0000

A one-line fix for a CUBLAS_STATUS_NOT_INITIALIZED crash: just update Ollama.